American Gods

I don’t know you, thought Shadow desperately. You’ve never met me before. We’re total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”

She blinked, looked at up his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. “Hello,” she said.

“I’ll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment.

Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you’re the melancholy but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who’da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.

“And you,” he said, “Are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?”

“If you promise to tell me what’s going on.”

“Deal.”

Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow’s pants. “Will you show me now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it’s done.”

“I promise,” said Leon, gravely.

Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leon’s right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow’s left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own.

After several attempts the boy mastered the move. “Now you know half of it,” said Shadow. “The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place it’s meant to be. If you act like it’s in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are.”

Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing.

“Dinner!” called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. “Leon, go wash your hands.”

There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.

“Old family recipe,” she told him, “from the Corsican side of the family.”

“I thought you were Native American.”

“Dad’s Cherokee,” said Sam. “Mag’s mom’s father came from Corsica.” Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the cabernet. “Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through. When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span.”

“Well, he’s been out in Oklahoma for ten years,” said Marguerite.

“Now, my mom’s family were European Jewish,” continued Sam, “from one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. I think she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver.” She took another sip of the red wine.

“Sam’s mom’s a wild woman,” said Marguerite, semiapprovingly.

“You know where she is now?” asked Sam. Shadow shook his head. “She’s in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart. When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she really liked Tasmania. So she’s living down there, with a woman’s group, teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. Isn’t that cool? At her age?”

Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs. Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the thylacines—the Tasmanian tigers—had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass of wine, poured her third.

“So, Mike,” said Sam, suddenly, her cheeks reddening, “tell us about your family. What are the Ainsels like?” She was smiling, and there was mischief in that smile.

“We’re real dull,” said Shadow. “None of us ever got as far as Tasmania. So you’re at school in Madison. What’s that like?”

“You know,” she said. “I’m studying art history, women’s studies, and casting my own bronzes.”

“When I grow up,” said Leon, “I’m going to do magic. Poof. Will you teach me, Mike Ainsel?”

“Sure,” said Shadow. “If your mom doesn’t mind.”

Sam said, “After we’ve eaten, while you’re putting Leon to bed, Mags, I think I’m going to get Mike to take me to the Buck Stops Here for an hour or so.”

Marguerite did not shrug. Her head moved, an eyebrow raised slightly.

“I think he’s interesting,” said Sam. “And we have lots to talk about.”

Marguerite looked at Shadow, who busied himself in dabbing an imaginary blob of red sauce from his chin with a paper napkin. “Well, you’re grownups,” she said, in a tone of voice that implied that they weren’t, and that even if they were they shouldn’t be.